Pulp Fantasy Library: The Strange High House in the Mist

H. P. Lovecraft’s “The Strange High House in the Mist” is a restrained yet quietly affecting tale, often grouped with his Dunsanian or Dreamlands stories. This is understandable, as the story shares with them a preoccupation with mood, suggestion, and the power of longing rather than with overt horror. Instead, it focuses on reverie and yearning, centered on an encounter with something ancient, beautiful, and meaningful that lies just beyond the reach of modern life. In this respect, the story offers a glimpse of Lovecraft’s wistful and elegiac sensibilities, one that is simultaneously at odds with and supportive of the horror stories for which he is better known.

First published in the October 1931 issue of Weird Tales, the story is set in Kingsport, Lovecraft’s fictionalized version of Marblehead, Massachusetts. Kingsport is a location to which he returned repeatedly as a symbol of the old New England (and, by extension, the old world) he so revered. The seaside town is portrayed as steeped in age and wonder. Here, the past is never entirely absent but lingers just beneath the surface of everyday life. In this particular case, that past takes the form of a strange house perched impossibly high on a cliff overlooking the Atlantic Ocean. The house is visible only at certain times, half-lost in mist, and the townsfolk are reluctant to learn more about it.

“The Strange High House in the Mist” reflects, in part, HPL's increasing preoccupation with the erosion of the strange and wondrous. Industrial modernity, the rise of mass society, and the perceived loss of continuity with the past weighed heavily on his imagination. In many of his stories from this time, these anxieties are transmuted into horror, with ancient survivals revealing humanity’s insignificance in an uncaring cosmos. In this tale, however, the same concerns are expressed through melancholy and yearning rather than terror.

The protagonist, Thomas Olney, is a philosopher vacationing in Kingsport. He is immediately captivated by the sight of the house on the cliff and feels an almost instinctive pull toward it. Driven by curiosity, Olney ascends the cliff and discovers that the house is indeed a peculiar locale.

When he climbed out of the chasm a morning mist was gathering, but he clearly saw the lofty and unhallowed cottage ahead; walls as grey as the rock, and high peak standing bold against the milky white of the seaward vapours. And he perceived that there was no door on this landward end, but only a couple of small lattice windows with dingy bull’s-eye panes leaded in seventeenth-century fashion. All around him was cloud and chaos, and he could see nothing below but the whiteness of illimitable space. He was alone in the sky with this queer and very disturbing house; and when he sidled around to the front and saw that the wall stood flush with the cliff’s edge, so that the single narrow door was not to be reached save from the empty aether, he felt a distinct terror that altitude could not wholly explain. And it was very odd that shingles so worm-eaten could survive, or bricks so crumbled still form a standing chimney.

Inside, he is welcomed by a bearded man who "seemed young, yet looked out of eyes steeped in the elder mysteries." The encounter is striking because it lacks the menace one might expect. The man is dignified and reflective, speaking of distant times and forgotten wonders. Olney’s visit is brief, but it has an effect on him, as we shall see. What he experiences is not forbidden knowledge in the usual Lovecraftian sense, but a momentary awakening to another manner of understanding the world.

Consequently, Olney leaves house a changed man – but not quite for the better. He does not remember what he saw in the house nor does he recall what he discussed with its lone inhabitant. In some sense, both real and metaphorical, he is no longer the same person who climbed the pinnacle and entered the house full of curiosity and wonder.

And ever since that hour, through dull dragging years of greyness and weariness, the philosopher has laboured and eaten and slept and done uncomplaining the suitable deeds of a citizen. Not any more does he long for the magic of farther hills, or sigh for secrets that peer like green reefs from a bottomless sea. The sameness of his days no longer gives him sorrow, and well-disciplined thoughts have grown enough for his imagination.

There is fear present in this story, but it's the fear not of cosmic annihilation or human insignificance, but of loss, specifically, the loss of imagination and curiosity, a perennial concern of Lovecraft. The tragedy is not that wonders such as the house are dangerous, but that the desire for such wonders is vanishing, driven away by unthinking skepticism and the structure of modern life.

In this respect, the story shares a great deal with “The White Ship,” “Celephaïs,” and “The Silver Key,” though I think it's more firmly anchored in something akin to the "real world." Rather than transporting its protagonist to a dream realm, the tale suggests that wonder lies just out of sight but still visible to those who seek for it. Of course, not everyone who does so will find his longing satisfied and, as in the case of Thomas Olney, the opposite might occur. 

Though it is easy to see why some readers classify the story among Lovecraft’s Dreamlands tales, it seems more accurate to view it as occupying a middle ground between his early, explicitly Dunsanian fantasies and his later, more austere and uncompromising cosmic horror. The unease it generates does not arise from revelations about what lies beyond humanity, but from an awareness of what humanity may have already abandoned. The true loss is not safety or sanity, but memory, imagination, and continuity with the past. 

Artwork by Joseph Doolin